Hedon

Hedon was described in 1658 as the ‘chief market town’ of Holderness – the coastal region of the East Riding.1 CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 285. Situated about five miles east of Hull and about two miles north east of the Humber Estuary, it had been a thriving port during the early medieval period, but by Tudor times was ‘much decayed’, with ‘no merchants of any estimation’.2 G.R. Park, Hist. of Hedon, 3. The town’s economy was centred largely on shoemaking, tanning and associated manufacturing and retailing trades.3 VCH E. Riding, v. 174-8. When the town was ravaged by fire in 1657, the losses, which were put at £4,000, were sustained mainly by ‘artificers and tradesmen’.4 CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 285. The borough contained 98 householders by the Restoration period, indicating an overall population of about 450. None of the inhabitants owned houses of more than six hearths, which suggests that the town was among the least prosperous of the Yorkshire boroughs.5 E179/205/514, m. 24v; E. Riding RO, DDHE/30/1 (Collns. rel. to Hedon), ff. 99v-118.

Hedon’s government was based on its royal charter of 1348, which specified a mayor, two bailiffs and various other municipal officials. New offices were subsequently created, and by 1640 the corporation included ten aldermen and a recorder. The mayor and bailiffs held regular courts, with the mayor and aldermen also serving as magistrates for the borough.6 E. Riding RO, DDHE/25 (Hedon Ct. Bk. 1642-7), unfol.; DDHE/26 (Hedon Ct. Bk. 1504-1668), unfol.; VCH E. Riding, v. 179; J.R. Boyle, Early Hist. of Hedon, 45-54, 62; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Hedon’. Hedon had first sent Members to Parliament in 1295, but its franchise had then lapsed until 1547.7 Park, Hedon, 138, 140. The right of election rested nominally with the town’s ‘burgesses’ – a term that had applied originally to the owners of burgage tenements, but by the seventeenth century had come to include freemen by birth, marriage, apprenticeship or purchase. During the early Stuart period, however, the franchise had been exercised largely by the corporation; and in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Matthew Alured and Thomas Strickland were returned by the mayor, aldermen, bailiffs and town clerk – 13 men in all – in accordance, or so it was claimed, with the established custom of the town. The returning officer was the mayor, who was elected annually from the aldermen.8 E. Riding RO, DDHE/26; Park, Hedon, 38-9, 139; Boyle, Hedon, 171-2; HP Commons 1604-1629.

By 1640, the town’s principal electoral patron was the godly local gentleman John Alured* of the Charterhouse, near Hull. Alured’s interest at Hedon derived from his title to the manor of Burstwick, which he leased from his father’s cousin, the Catholic peer Henry Constable, 1st Viscount Dunbar [S], lord of the seigniory of Holderness. Hedon was part of the manor of Burstwick, and as leaseholder, Alured was able to exercise considerable influence within the borough. He may also have owned a farm on the town’s outskirts.9 C142/452/42; E134/3CHAS1/EAST13; Poulson, Holderness, ii. 140; HP Commons 1604-1629. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Hedon returned Alured and Sir Philip Stapilton of Warter Priory, near Pocklington. Stapilton does not appear to have owned property in the vicinity of Hedon, and it is likely that he was elected on Alured’s interest.10 Infra, ‘Sir Philip Stapilton’. The election indenture has not survived.

In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, the borough returned Alured again, this time paired with the godly East Riding knight Sir William Strickland of Boynton, near Bridlington. Again, the election indenture has not survived. Although Strickland owned property in the Hull area, it is likely that he, too, owed his election to Alured.11 Infra, ‘Sir William Strickland’. Both Alured and Strickland sided with Parliament during the civil war and would retain their seats at Pride’s Purge in December 1648.

After Alured’s death in 1650, his interest at Hedon was taken over by his younger brother, the army officer Colonel Matthew Alured*, who, by the mid-1650s, had established control over Viscount Dunbar’s sequestered estates.12 CCC 2155. As a republican and a bitter opponent of all royalists and their confederates, Alured was probably far more radical in his views than many of Hedon’s leading inhabitants, who were denounced in print in 1659 as ‘drunken, idle and vicious persons, and all the corporation for the most part little better, being a nest of cavaliers, tinkers, drunken and malignant men’.13 R. Raikes, The Great and Grievous Oppression of the Subject (1659), 1 (E.989.14). Their accuser, the Hull merchant Robert Raikes, who professed himself a member of ‘the Parliament’s party’ and had been involved in a long-running and often violent quarrel with the corporation, complained bitterly that the mayor and aldermen were virtually a law unto themselves, ‘for the country justices do not meddle therewith, or are suffered so to do, by reason of the charter [of 1348] the said town doth plead, and thereby thinketh, they may pervert justice as they themselves list’.14 E. Riding RO, DDHE/5/1 (Quarter sessions min. bk. 1657-1745), unfol.; Raikes, Great and Grievous Oppression, 5, 9. If Raikes is to believed (and he was almost certainly exaggerating in many instances), the town contained very few men of any substance, morals, education, or good affection to the commonwealth. Nevertheless, Hedon was evidently not without friends among the local parliamentarian gentry, for when a large part of the town was destroyed by fire in 1657, the corporation’s petition to the lord protector for relief was supported by Sir William Strickland, the godly local gentleman John Anlaby* and the distinguished parliamentarian officer (Sir) Hugh Bethell*.15 CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 285.

Disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government, Hedon regained its seats in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659. On 13 January, the mayor and senior office-holders ordered that Colonel Matthew Alured and Thomas Strickland, the twenty-year old son of Sir William Strickland, be ‘admitted to the fellowship of the burgesses’ (only freemen, it seems, being eligible to serve the borough in Parliament) and then elected them as the town’s MPs.16 E. Riding RO, DDHE/26. Alured was returned on his own interest, which his gift of a large silver goblet to the corporation in 1658 or early 1659 would doubtless have consolidated.17 Park, Hedon, 127, 154. Strickland was elected, it seems, out of gratitude to his father, who had helped to obtain relief for the borough after the 1657 fire. Strickland chose to sit for Beverley, however, and Richard Cromwell’s Parliament was dissolved before a writ for a new election at Hedon was issued.

At the Restoration, Alured lost most of his estate and with it his electoral interest at Hedon, and in the elections to the 1660 Convention and Cavalier Parliaments the town returned Sir Hugh Bethell, now a moderate royalist, and other supporters of the new regime.18 HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Hedon’. That the commissioners for corporations thought it necessary to remove only two of the senior office-holders at Hedon may be further evidence that the corporation was dominated by men of conservative political sympathies.19 Park, Hedon, 93-4.